A quality–time–cost-oriented strategy for product conceptualization

In general, product development companies aim to deliver products of optimal quality while incurring minimal cost in the shortest time possible. In this work, a quality–time–cost-oriented strategy (QTCOS) is proposed to facilitate product concept generation and selection. Firstly, general sorting is employed to elicit an initial product platform. The platform, constructed with a design space framework (DSF), serves as a base for generating a preliminary range of design options. Using the repertory grids elicitation method, designers contribute importance ratings with respect to a set of time and cost criteria for the range of design options. To account for trade-offs between cost and time related concerns, these ratings are employed to reduce the number of the derived design options, and thereby used as input features to a restricted coulomb energy (RCE) neural network. The RCE network function is applied to classify the set of design options into different patterns, i.e. cost–time-pairs. The classification results can subsequently serve as bases for the selection of preferred design options. A case study on wood golf club design is conducted to illustrate the proposed QTCOS.